One long string of banalities about the mortification of being a studious quiet high-school girl with a flighty brassy pushy mom. (Natalie Portman, Susan Sarandon, respectively.) The slums-of-Beverly-Hills milieu was better captured in The Slums of Beverly Hills, as was, for that matter, the feeling of adolescent mortification. The periodic promising idea -- the daughter coolly watching her mother search for her in mounting panic at the airport, the big family blowup at a funeral reception back in Wisconsin -- somehow never seems to be held onto for all it's worth. On the other hand, the all-baloney scene -- the mother, after pushing her daughter into an acting audition, now pushes her way through the studio door to observe, and is rewarded with a sub-Blanche Du Bois improvisational caricature of herself -- feels interminable. Directed by Wayne Wang. (1999) — Duncan Shepherd
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